“How does this request sound?” Ariya asked.
“There’s no open space there. We should go for this one instead,” I said.
The next day, Ariya and I stood in front of the job board and tried to find one that would allow me to test out my gun. For us to do so, we’d have to slip out of town at night. This wasn’t too hard for me, since I could teleport away or travel through the shadows, but Ariya couldn’t do either of those things. She needed a pretense to be active at night. With that in mind, we were looking for suitable jobs that would give us a reason to leave.
I’d brought Sylph with us, and though she popped her head out of my pocket at times, she didn’t catch anyone’s attention. I had the fact that she more or less blended in with my black shirt to thank for that.
What happened to the elf that she’d possessed, you might be wondering? Well, as soon as she woke up, I used my hypnosis on her to manipulate her memories and sent her on her way. I was glad that I was able to hypnotize her easily, without any problems. Maybe the confusion she felt when she awoke helped to make her mind more vulnerable, so I had no trouble hypnotizing her this time around.
“Oh, you took this job not too long ago, right?” I asked, pointing to one of the papers on the board. “Harvesting dawn flowers.”
“Yes. Last time, I accidentally stumbled across a small clearing where they grow. This one might be a good choice since we know where to find them, and there’ll be an open space.”
Dawn flowers only bloomed in the few moments before the sun rose. They were apparently used in medicine, and they were most efficacious at full bloom, but it was hard to harvest them since there was a very small window when they bloomed.
“Hm... Not bad. That would leave us plenty of time to test things out.”
“I’ll go accept the job, then,” Ariya said, taking the piece of paper and walking it over to the reception desk.
While we waited for her to return, I began eavesdropping, listening for any hot gossip going around the guild. There was talk about Holy Knights, about prostitutes, about monsters, about Kiri looking at the job board, about Kiri finally getting off his ass and taking a job, about how only Black Rose had gone to the reception desk, about how it was possible that Kiri wasn’t actually taking a job after all—the usual scattered gossip. Man, these guys have such a low opinion of me.
“Kiri,” said Ariya as she returned, “I also accepted a skeleton suppression request.”
“Hm, okay. That’s fine.” Skeletons were easy to take down, so I had no problem with that.
“We’ll be able to camp out for two days without arousing any suspicion.”
“I don’t think I need a whole two days to experiment, but it’ll be nice to pair up again. It’s been a while.” Perhaps there was a need for me to reconsider how I fought, though, now that Sylph was in the mix.
Suddenly, the doors to the guild were flung open, and an adventurer fell upon the floor.
“Hm? A newbie?”
“Did something happen?”
The guild members began to stir restlessly.
“Stampede! The Stampede is here!” the newbie screamed, jumping to his feet.
“Huh? The Stampede?” Though the newbie seemed very desperate and frightened, the other guild members just looked at him doubtfully.
“You sure about that? Shouldn’t be happenin’ this year.”
“You have one too many, bud?”
No one seemed to be taking him seriously. Some even called him a pussy. Ow! Okay, that was me, and I got a kick from Ariya for it. In the meantime, the girl from the reception desk approached the newbie.
“You are from the F-ranked party, Lord of Horizon, correct?” Whew, what a name. “Are you certain that you saw the Stampede and not just a group of beasts? If so, we must take action.”
“Y-Yeah—there were five skeletons. Plus, we could sense a lot of...something around them. It was definitely a whole horde of monsters—”
“Oh, you dumb kid...”
“That’s normal shit.”
“Nothing new. Happens every now and then.”
These words from various adventurers seemed to surprise the newbie.
“I apologize,” said the girl from the reception desk, “but I must conclude that the likelihood of what you witnessed being the Stampede is low.”
“Wh-Why?!”
“It is a normal occurrence for skeletons to appear around Regin. And the presence you felt most likely came from the wolves.”
“Huh?”
“After a skeleton kills a human, they do not consume them as other monsters may. Instead, they leave them where they lie. Wolves follow the skeletons to eat the carcasses of the things they slay. There is not a high level of danger, and this is not too out of the ordinary. Thus, I would say that the probability of this being a sign of the Stampede is low.”
This guy was literally becoming the boy who cried wolf.
“This ain’t no place for kids who get freaked out by skeletons. Run on home and play adventurer with your little friends or somethin’.”
The guild erupted into laughter as they ridiculed the newbie, who left with his tail tucked between his legs.
“Hm... Maybe I should claim I saw the Stampede someday.”
“Please don’t. Are you trying to become the boy who cried wolf?”
Since the work on my weapon would apparently be completed the next day, I decided to spend the day training with Sister Sensei as usual. I didn’t understand how the turnaround on forging a weapon could be so quick, but I ultimately decided against thinking about it too much because hey, this was a fantasy world.